The Fugitive

The two-minute 'Fugitive'

Marcel dispatches Robert de St. Loup to offer Albertine's aunt 30,000
francs to persuade the fugitive to return. More directly, he tells
Albertine that he had ordered a yacht and a Rolls for her; what a pity
they won't be used! And he plays the jealousy card by suggesting that
Andée could replace her. (He never thinks to say: "I love you.
Please come back!") Alas, the next news he gets is from the aunt, telling
him that Albertine was killed in a fall from her horse. This sets Marcel
off on a hundred-page revel in the metaphysics of grief.

He knows he's healing when he sees a provocative blonde in the
street and sets out to learn her name: Forcheville. She
proves to be his childhood sweetheart, Gilberte Swann, whose
mother has remarried the impoverished nobleman who was sniffing about
her in Swann's Way, and who as part of the deal
adopted Gilberte. Marcel then does take up with Andrée,
who spins all sorts of lurid stories about the dead girl, some
of them involving the violinist Morel.

Marcel and his mother make his long-delayed pilgrimage to Venice,
and Gilberte marries St. Loup—who like almost every character
in the novel, is now revealed to be a homosexual. Marcel visits Mme.
de St. Loup at Tansonville and learns, among other things, that
when he first spied her on those premises as a boy, the gesture she
flipped him wasn't a dismissal but an invitation to the ball.

On grief and jealousy

As when Marcel grieves for his grandmother on his second visit to Balbec,
Proust never writes so compelling as when the subject is loss.
Here he is (p.477-478) yearning for Albertine:
My imagination sought her in the skies, on evenings like those when we
were still able to gaze at it together; I tried to wing my affections
towards her, beyond the moonlight that she loved, to console her for
no longer being alive, and this love for a person who had become so
remote was like a religion, my thoughts rose toward her like prayers.

Less moving, but no less brilliant, is the way (p.554) he shows grief
receding. The Duchesse de Guermantes invites him to the opera.
But I replied sadly: "No, I cannot go to the
theatre, I have lost a friend. She was very dear to me." The tears
nearly came to my eyes as I said it and yet for the first time I felt
something akin to pleasure in talking about it. It was from that moment
that I started to write to everyone to tell them of my great sorrow
and to cease to feel it. That cuts fairly close to
the bone!

Because it was never finally reviewed by Proust (who died before it
was published), The Fugitive is rough in spots, but also
revealing. In the earlier books, I felt that the characters were
younger than the conventional wisdom would have them. In
In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, Marcel and the girls are
generally thought to be eighteen, but here Marcel refers to the
Albertine of that era (p.469) as "appearing to me at the moment of
puberty," which is more or less how I placed all of them at Balbec.
(Later, to be sure, he suggests that they were sixteen.)

Ronald Hayman tells us that Proust cut
250 pages from this already-short book, and changed its title from La Fugitive
to Albertine disparue. The re-titling was done, but Robert
his brother and Jacques Rivière ignored the cuts in the edition
published in 1925. "It is clear," Hayman writes, "that what [Proust]
had in mind was whole volumes to be interpolated between Albertine
disparue and Le Temps retrouvé. (Whole volumes,
mon dieu!) In the truncated book, Albertine runs off to join
her lesbian friends, thus mooting much of Marcel's ponderings about
this element of her nature; she dies on the bank of the Vivonne in
Combray, instead of in Touraine; and the chapter about Gilbert and
Andrée is jettisoned.

The Penguin Proust

I am no longer conscious that I am reading a new translation, nor that
I am in the hands of seven different translators; I'm simply reading
for pleasure. (I doubt however that I would be having as much fun if
I were simply reading Scott Moncrieff for the third time, however much
his prose might have been tweaked more recently by Kilmartin and Enright.)

I mentioned earlier that the British editions leave Proust's literary
quotations in French, with an English translation in the notes, while
the American editions do just the opposite. This didn't trouble me until
I came to pages 426-427 of the Prisoner/Fugitive volume,
where five quotations from Racine appear in the same long paragraph.
I found this a bit irritating: if my French is insufficient to allow me
to read Proust in the original, why should the editors assume that I
can read Racine?

The gotcha! below gave me a reason to compare the old and new translations.
In The Sweet Cheat Gone, Scott Moncrief writes as follows:
Associated now with the memory of my love,
Albertine's physical and social attributes, in spite of which I had
loved her, attracted my desire on the contrary towards what at one
time it would least readily have chosen: dark girls of the lower
middle class.

Which Peter Collier renders: Now that
they were associated with the memory of my love, the physical and
social attributes of Albertine, whom I had loved in spite of them,
had the opposite effect, that of orientating my desire towards what
previously it would have least naturally have chosen, dark-haired
girls from the lower-middle classes.

Gotcha!

Oh, good grief! On page 518, Mr. Collier has Marcel say orientating. This is particularly
funny since the verb comes from the French orienter, not
orientater! Remembering that I got caught with the British spelling
of appal in
The Prisoner, I immediately went to the Shorter Oxford, and
as I suspected, orientate appears there only as an alternate
spelling of the verb orient, with the notation that it is
probably a "back-form" from orientation. I detest these
superfluous syllables. Why would anyone say orientate for
orient, or preventative for preventive? I am
sure that Proust would not have been so sloppy!

Which is not to say he was never sloppy: in Swann's Way,
Gilberte is a redhead, but in The Fugitive she is blonde
(and remembered as a blonde).

Swann's Way, Guermantes Way

When Gilberte married St. Loup, the two "ways" of Marcel's boyhood
are joined. And when Marcel goes to Tansonville to visit Mme. de St. Loup,
he is astonished to have her tell him that the "ways" are actually
one and the same: Gilberte said: "If you
like, we could still go out one afternoon to walk towards Guermantes,
but we could walk past Méséglise [i.e.,
Swann's way],
it's the prettiest route," a sentence which overturned all the ideas
of my childhood by revealing that the two ways were not as
irreconcilable as I had thought.

The Enright version
Personally, I think the Penguin Proust is the way to go, but
if you are a traditionalist you can get a handsome paperback
of the Enright - Scott Moncrieff translation at Amazon.com.
Click here to order.
You can also get it as part of a boxed set for
about $60.
Click here to order.

The biography

Proustian in its size and often
in its prose, and requiring a Proustian commitment of time, this is
without question the biography. I recommend it to anyone who
has read and enjoyed the novel, or who like me is re-reading it.
Especially after about page 500, it also serves as a field guide to
In Search of Lost Time.
Look for used copies here

A moveable website

The essence of this website is available as an
e-book for the Kindle, readable also on the Apple iPhone or Touch. See
The
14-Minute Marcel Proust on Amazon.com. A paperback edition will
also be published soon.